On a good day, the unpleasant byproducts of human existence simply flow tepidly beneath their noses.
On lesser days, unmentionable objects block the huge grates in the sewer channels. The workers descend knee deep into the muck and scrape at the dripping clogs. The gunk drips to their shoulders and splashes on their faces, working its way into pores and psyches.
But many of the nearly 1,200 workers who process some 1.4 billion gallons of New York City sewage every day say they can handle those indignities.
What disgusts them, what has tested sobriety, credit ratings and marriages more than any stubborn stench, is the fact that they have not received raises in up to 15 years, even as most of the city’s municipal labor force has enjoyed nearly a dozen years of inflation-beating wage increases. Read more…
Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesStudents at the Marymount School caught a glimpse of the parade from a window facing Fifth Avenue. More photos »
For a French restaurant with a fairly patrician customer base, Demarchelier, on East 86th Street at Madison Avenue, saw a fair amount of trade on Wednesday from the green T-shirt crowd. In the bar area, Irish music blared and plastic foam cups of beer were raised.
Two New York taxi drivers were convicted in 2008 of swindling passengers by charging higher rates meant for out-of-town trips, but city officials failed to follow up with a broader investigation that might have revealed the scheme to be far more widespread.
The separate incidents, which occurred within weeks of each other in the spring of 2008, came nearly two years before the Taxi and Limousine Commission realized the true pervasiveness of the meter-fixing practice. The city revealed last week that about 3,000 cabbies had overcharged 1.8 million riders over two years, costing passengers a total of $8.3 million in illegal charges.
But officials at the taxi commission, which investigated the two cases in 2008, never thought to examine GPS data from other yellow cabs to see whether the fraud extended beyond the specific cases. “They didn’t raise a red flag,” said an official at the agency.
“A lot of this reaction is based on just ignorance, on not knowing the facts, not dealing really with the issues,” he said. “There’s a lot of emotional hysteria out there.” Read more…
Many would like to see the hipster — the word, to say nothing of the person behind it — go the way of the dodo. Only problem: those who would retire the word can’t help using it.
This point was made Tuesday night by Paolo Mastrangelo on NYC The Tumblr, who noted that even some prominent anti-hipster voices, including one writer at Gawker, resort to using the term as a kind of shorthand for all things young or urban or tight-jeaned or ironic or tattooed or … whatever. It just works.
Maybe people are using the word wrong, and that rankles people. But it does have a use, and it does apply to certain people. Kamer [writing on Runnin' Scared] brushed against its true meaning when he wrote that “maybe” it applies to an “enclave in whatever part of your town is being gentrified by the moneyed children of baby boomers.” Not maybe. Most likely.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesKirsten Gillibrand and Gov. David A. Paterson at his announcement last year of her appointment to the Senate.
When Gov. David A. Paterson appointed a little-known junior congresswoman named Kirsten E. Gillibrand to the United States Senate last year, he probably expected it to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Instead, Ms. Gillibrand — struggling to establish herself as the state’s junior senator and fend off rivals from within and outside her party — kept her distance from the embattled governor, not even attending the kickoff last month of Mr. Paterson’s now-aborted election campaign. Read more…
Karim Selmaoui/European Press Photo AgencyTariq Ramadan at a news conference on March 4 in Morocco.
A prominent Muslim academic barred from the United States for six years under the Patriot Act will speak at a panel at Cooper Union next month, his first public appearance since the restriction was lifted.
The scholar, Tariq Ramadan, will speak at “Secularism, Islam and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West,” presented on April 8 by the American Association for University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center and Slate.
When Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly arrived a few minutes late to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Mass on Wednesday morning, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan gently ribbed him for being tardy.
However, Mr. Kelly, who was the grand marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, had a legitimate excuse: He had stopped on the Upper East Side to aid a bloodied, unconscious woman who had been struck by a bicycle, according to the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Read more…
Associated Press/Abraham Lincoln Book ShopWas Abraham Lincoln a terrible speller and grammarian? Experts say yes, but cut him some slack.
Abraham Lincoln wrote the letter, an election year paean to the Methodist church, in 1864, at the height of his rhetorical powers, after the Gettysburg Address and before his second inaugural speech. Yet to the modern eye, the letter suffers from some all-too human flaws.
Nathaniel Brooks
for The New York Times Marissa Shorenstein at the State Capitol in August 2008.
Marissa Shorenstein, Gov. David A. Paterson’s press secretary and acting chief spokeswoman, resigned on Wednesday. She becomes the fifth top state official to resign in the wake of a scandal over the Paterson administration’s handling of a domestic violence incident.
“It has been a privilege to serve New York State for the past two years, and I thank the governor for giving me the opportunity to do so,” Ms. Shorenstein said in a statement.
The governor appointed Morgan Hook, who had been his upstate press secretary, to be his new director of communications shortly after Ms. Shorenstein resigned. Mr. Hook is a former television news reporter and anchor, most recently in the Albany area. At the beginning of the month, he was the third-ranking official in the governor’s communications shop, and now he gets the top job after the resignations of the former communications director, Peter E. Kauffmann, and Ms. Shorenstein. Read more…
A half-century ago, as the Democratic machine, its best days behind it, was being successfully challenged by reformers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an eloquent essay entitled “When the Irish Ran New York.” It’s particularly appropriate to recall Mr. Moynihan’s nostalgic musings not merely because of St. Patrick’s Day, but because nowadays it appears as if no one is running New York.
Clubhouse politics has been much maligned since the reform movement emerged in the 1950s, but at least party regulars could claim credit for an organization that, while skimming its share of graft, also rammed through landmark legislation when the public and political interest coincided and produced some great statesmen (in part by vetting candidates to avoid embarrassing personal revelations that might jeopardize the party’s larger mission of self-perpetuation).
Following is the first set of responses from Nick Carr, who for the past five years has worked as a film location scout in New York, combing the streets for every type of locale imaginable for use in feature films and on television.
How does one become a film location scout? What would you recommend to people who feel they know most nooks and crannies in the city and would be interested in this career?
Before there was freak-folk, there were Carole and Paula. Some of the happiest — O.K., maybe not happiest; most retrospectively poignant? — moments of City Room’s collective childhood were spent parked in front of Channel 11 passively frolicking in their Magic Garden, hanging on our pigtailed hosts’ every strum, watching them pluck koanlike riddles from the Chuckle Patch and get fresh with the ur-freak Sherlock the Squirrel, waiting vainly to be shouted out on the hi-to-Johnny-and-Sally-and-Sue segment.
So it was with joy and a little trepidation that we learned that they’ll be performing a rare show on Sunday at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, featuring not just live renditions of all our favorite hits from “The Magic Garden” (1972-84) but a discussion of “the program’s fascinating history and ongoing popularity, including on-screen clips of original episodes, some not seen for almost 30 years” — the better, perhaps, to measure our memories against their current incarnation. Maybe this time they’ll finally say our names. See ya!
The police approached three men on the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens, on Wednesday just after midnight and found the body of a 25-year-old man who had been stabbed to death. The three men were arrested. Officers had stopped near the Boardwalk and Beach 12th Street to check on an occupied car illegally parked near the beach, a law enforcement official said. It was not immediately clear if the car was connected to the killing, or if the body was on the beach itself or nearby. Charges are pending.(0)
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Nick Carr, who runs the Web site ScoutingNY, responds to readers.
